Climate Change

Many websites are bringing blow-by-blow news from the climate conference in Copenhagen. For example the regular updates by the BBC's respected enviornmental correspondant Richard Black's can be found here

We can only stand back and wait as the clock ticks down on an issue that many believe relates directly to the survival of our own species as well as so many others.

Meanwhile we can see unusual alligencies forming as various actors try to make a positive impact on the negotiations. Perhaps the most dramatic of these is the one common editorial published by 56 newspapers in 45 countries in 20 different languages. This is unprecedented. The article starts likes this:

"Unless we combine to take decisive action, climte change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted."

And it end with these words:

"The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice."

You can find the full article here.

Just before Ebenezer Scrooge is left by the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present, he notices that the spirit had something hidden in the skirts of his festive robe. Perhaps unwisely he asks what it is and the ghost moves his robe to reveal two child-like but nonetheless fiendish figures. He names the girl as ‘Want’ and the boy ‘Ignorance’.

‘Are they yours?’ says Scrooge but the ghost replies ‘They are man’s!’

‘A Christmas Carole’ is Charles Dicken’s fantasy morality tale and Scrooge is given a chance to redeem himself. He becomes a better man and Tiny Tim, the crippled son of his long suffering clerk, Bob Crachit, is also given a reprieve. He will live, thanks to the new generosity of the reformed miser.

'Man', as Dicken’s called us (or humankind as we might prefer now), is at a cross roads. We can let Ignorance and Want continue to guide us (and perhaps ‘Greed’ would be a better modern word for Want), or we can wake-up to the seriousness and stupidity of our current situation and act. The time-line is brief. In fact, the wake-up and the action need to come this very next week and Copenhagen – the United Nations 15^th Climate Change Conference – is the place.

As the media goes into frenzy over this crucial meeting of the world’s nations, there will be many confusing and conflicting reports of both the issue and the meeting. As I write, the news in the UK is already dominated by a story that some scientists have allegedly misrepresented some of the key evidence about climate change. This will add wind to the argument preferred by many that human-driven climate change is neither true nor dangerous (despite all the evidence to the contrary).

To be frank I much prefer this argument too. It makes me feel a lot happier. It let’s me hope that all I hold dear, my family and friends, the whales, the dolphins, and much more besides, is going to be fine.

Sadly it is not true. And this story of misuse of evidence may even obscure what will happen in Copehagen.

I have followed the climate change issue for many years. I first wrote about the threat of climate change to cetaceans when we were still dealing in broad theories. However, I felt then that the risk for them (and us) then was too great to continue in our 'kamikaze mission’ to over-exploit the world’s resources, irrationally expand our populations, and pump climate-changing gases into the atmosphere. But I also thought at that time (some twenty years ago) that this was a slow process. I thought it was going to be more a threat to future generations. The news, however, is that things are happening fast; more than swiftly enough to threaten the current human generations as well as those yet to come.

I have no doubt that climate is changing. No doubt that we are to blame and no doubt that this is the most serious threat to all living things. Not everything is perfectly worked out yet, no one is saying this (although predictive powers are improving) and please don’t be confused with descriptions of previous periods of global warming and cooling. That’s all true, but what we are now facing is unprecedented. (This is rather like the argument that species have always gone extinct in the past and it is a perfectly natural process; also true but again the current rate of extinctions is outside any natural range and it too is human-driven.)

Dickens was a kind man. He gave the eponymous miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, a second chance and, in this fine fiction, the old man understood and acted. We are in that same position but this is no fiction. Some suggest we need to stabilize climate gases by 2015 – only five years away - and this will clearly require a major re-think in the way that we all live. The emissions of climate changing gases have to be reduced not just by a few percent, they have to be radically curtailed and this is going to cause real pain in the developed nations.

The signs for the Copehagen meeting are not good. It seems unlikely that the major polluters will agree to something that significantly handicaps their economies. However the US is now taking part at the highest level and that’s an enormous change of approach from their position in recent years.

WDCS will not be at the meeting in Copenhagen, but we will be watching closely like many others. We know how big meetings works and we will be willing the negotiators to make real progress; and willing our species to renounce the Ignorance and Greed that we have been shackled to for too long. If you want to read more about the issue click here. The Copenhagen conference also has its own website here.

Mark Simmonds, WDCS International Director of Science

What an amazing week it has been in Australian politics. Poised as we were for pre-Copenhagen Emissions Trading legislation to be passed, a leadership spill in the opposition Liberal Party (centre-right) and their subsequent radical and swift retreat from climate change policy caused the second defeat of the legislation in the Senate, and a trigger for the Government to call a double dissolution election. Mere hours ago, the Government announced that it will bring the legislation back for a third attempt in February, but this will be after the Copenhagen meeting.